Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much his Department spent on exempt accommodation in each of the last three years.

Providing the requested information would incur disproportionate costs to the Department due to the resource required to resolve data quality issues on exempt accommodation, which is a particular type of supported housing.

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is working to resolve a historical data quality issue in relation to how supported housing status is captured on Housing Benefit claims. The resulting fix will be for new claims and will not address historic claims.

In 2022, DWP made investments to deliver improvements to local authority (LA) IT systems, to accurately record all new Housing Benefit claims. This has substantially improved data quality for new claims. DWP have also taken action to improve data on existing claims. LAs have received funding to review their Housing Benefit caseload and set the supported housing status accurately by 31^st March 2024.

The Departments’ analysts will then make a final assessment of these case reviews in Summer 2024, once they have received the full relevant data set, and will determine whether it is sufficiently robust to support quantification of the scale and cost of specified accommodation.